Sudoku Made and maintained by Brian Hamilton and Karan Hamilton.
Brian builds the playable puzzle tools, while Karan helps test clarity, difficulty feel, and the player experience.
Playable puzzles and controls are tested in the browser for rule accuracy, usability, and a clear solving experience. See how we make and test puzzles, our editorial standards, or report a problem.
Which pictures are in Christmas sudoku?
Christmas Sudoku deals nine of them, standing in for the digits of an otherwise classic sudoku: a tree, a gift, Santa, a wrapped candy, a reindeer, a snowflake, a bell, a star and a cookie. Each goes once in every row, column and box. Our themed sudoku page covers the views, sizes and levels for all 21 games in one go, which leaves this page for the Christmas set, and how we use it in December.
The smaller boards take the first pictures in the set:
| Board | Pictures | New at this size |
|---|---|---|
| 4×4 | 4 | 🎄 Tree 1, 🎁 Gift 2, 🎅 Santa 3, 🍬 Candy 4 |
| 6×6 | 6 | 🦌 Reindeer 5, ❄️ Snowflake 6 |
| 9×9 | 9 | 🔔 Bell 7, ⭐ Star 8, 🍪 Cookie 9 |
The game’s own names. Each number is the digit that stands in for the picture in Numbers view and sits beside it in Both.
So if the youngest at the table asks where the reindeer went, it is waiting on 6×6, and the bell, the star and the cookie only turn up on the full 9×9 board.
Picture 4 is the 🍬 candy emoji, a sweet in a twisted wrapper rather than a candy cane, and the game calls it Candy. All nine are ordinary emoji drawn by your own phone or computer, so an iPhone’s Santa is not quite the Santa on Windows; the puzzle is the same.
Can you play Christmas sudoku on a phone?
Yes. The worry with a picture set is two tiles blurring together at fingernail size, and the snowflake and the star seemed the likely pair. They are not close: the snowflake is drawn blue and the star gold, and the gift, a wrapped box, looks nothing like the round brown cookie.
On a screen 390 pixels wide, a 9×9 square is 34 pixels across and the picture in it about 18. At that size, in Chrome on Windows, all nine Christmas pictures stayed distinct in our screenshots, in the light theme and the dark.
The nearest pair is the 🔔 Bell and the ⭐ Star, both gold but different in outline. If a young solver still mixes two up, the Both view adds each picture’s number in a corner of its square. On a phone the 9×9 squares are small, so keep the youngest on the bigger squares of 4×4 and 6×6.
Is Christmas sudoku good for young children?
It is why this page exists. We built the site as grandparents who wanted our grandchildren to grow up with the puzzles we did, and December is the one month the whole family is reliably round the same table. A board of gifts and reindeer gets a young child to sit down beside a grandparent in a way a grid of digits never has.
A child who cannot read numbers yet can still solve a 4×4 board, with one question per empty square: once you have checked its row, its column and its box, which picture is still missing?
That is a naked single, the move to teach first. A wrong picture turns grey as soon as it is placed, so a child sees the slip without a grown-up pointing it out. There is more on teaching it in our sudoku for kids guide, and a numbers-only version of the small board at 4x4 Sudoku.
How do you make a sudoku advent calendar?
Our favourite way to use this page: one puzzle a day from 1 December, growing with the month. 4×4 Easy in the first week with the youngest solvers, 6×6 through the middle of the month, then 9×9 as Christmas gets close. The game keeps no calendar, so it is a plan you run yourself; the board in progress is saved in your browser, so a puzzle left half done on the 3rd is still there on the 4th.
We don’t print the picture boards. For paper, the printable 4×4 and printable 6×6 sets are the same sizes in numbers, with answers.
The calendar stops on the 24th. New Year’s Sudoku has the countdown to midnight on the 31st, and Winter Sudoku keeps the snow without Santa for January and February.
Is there a hard Christmas sudoku for adults?
Save a 9×9 Expert board for Christmas Eve and make it the family boss fight: one person scans the rows, another takes the boxes, and the youngest calls out which pictures are still missing. The timer will remember exactly how long the argument lasted.
Expert boards start with the fewest pictures, and some need more than singles. Fill in pencil marks (Auto Notes does every square at once) and look for two squares in one row, column or box that can hold only the same two pictures:
That is a naked pair, the hardest step an Expert board here is built to need. Locked candidates, the other step past singles, had already done its work on this board before the pair could be seen.